i am making a breakout style game, and want to have the score
count up +1 for every 1/4 of a second (or 250 miliseconds).
The problem is, when I use a while loop, I get the error
saying "something is slowing flash down, would you like to abort?".
I assuming all the cpu is being gobbled up by the while loop, but
what otehr alternative is there?

Okay, maybe not that wrong and not soooo many ways, but it
really isn't what you want to do. You should never use while or for
loops to do anything that you want distributed over time. That
isn't what they are for and you will get the dreaded "slow script"
message.

The point of setInterval is that it does something at the
interval you set. So if you do:

That will add one point to the total (assuming you have
defined pointage to be some numeric value elsewhere before this all
starts) approximately every 250 milliseconds.

Also, while(true) seems very odd to me. The while()
expression is supposed to keep going as long as what is between the
parens is true. So normally it would look something like
while(someVar>8) or some such. That has the chance of being
either false or true. But while (true) is pretty much always going
to be true. (Except maybe on opposite day, but I haven't had one of
those since highschool!)

So I've added a part of the upScore routine that checks to
see if the inPlay variable is true and if it is it will up the
score and if it isn't it will stop the accumulation of score. The
inPlay is would be a boolean variable that is set by whatever
routine you are using to see if the ball has been missed or not.